“You mean like a… ” Miranda shook her head as if the very thought was troubling. “A bio-weapon?”
“Exactly. And maybe it got away from them.”
Bell nodded again. “I think that’s exactly what happened.”
“The guy we caught at Chichén Itzá said that the Serpent Brothers were trying to protect the world from the Shadow. ‘The Shadow must remain hidden or the world will die.’ That’s what he said.” Maddock was thinking out loud, but the pieces were falling into place faster than he could speak. “What if these Serpent Brothers aren’t the bad guys? What if they’re trying to stop this disease — the Shadow — from getting out again?”
Bones snapped his fingers. “The Maya apocalypse! Maybe the prophecy was a warning about another outbreak. Or a timeline. And the Serpent Brothers decided to call it off.”
Maddock shook his head. “I don’t know if I’d go that far, but… ” He turned to Bell again. “You suspected this all along, didn’t you? That’s why Tam sent us in.”
Bell frowned as if this line of thinking disturbed him, but then returned a hesitant nod.
Angel now spoke up. “Do you think that fungus… the River of Pus… was the Shadow?”
Maddock had no answer. Neither did Bell.
“That’s good, right?” Angel went on. “It means we destroyed it.”
“Something tells me if it was that easy,” Maddock replied, “the Serpent Brothers would have already done it. There’s probably a lot more of that fungus around.”
“The Lords of Xibalba have always been associated with a literal Underworld,” Bell said. “The fungus probably came out of a cavern system somewhere near here. Maybe even under this temple.”
“We’ve already tempted fate once,” Maddock said. “Right now, we need to focus on finding a way out of here.”
“It may be too late for that,” Bell said. “I told you, we’re on a pilgrimage.”
Bones gave a snort of disgust. “So we have to go through hell to get out of here? Outstanding. You don’t think maybe you could have mentioned Rivers of Pus and Jaundice demons before we started this one-way trip?”
Bell gave a helpless shrug.
“I’m sure there’s a way out of here that doesn’t involve going deeper,” Maddock said. “Start looking around.”
He was trying to remain optimistic despite sharing Bones’ grim assessment, but it nevertheless came as a real surprise when, after just a few minutes, they found another staircase on the far side of the chamber, leading up, not down.
Maddock remained wary, half-expecting another trial or for the steps to reverse direction, but the stairs kept rising until, some fifteen minutes after departing the chamber with the statues of the Lords of Xibalba, Maddock felt fresh air on his face. Not long after that, they came to a partially overgrown opening, and emerged into the relatively open air of a Guatemalan jungle night.
Only Charles Bell seemed disappointed.
CHAPTER 21
For a long time after giving Alex his answer, Simpson sat alone in the lab office, wondering what to do.
He didn’t know if his employer believed the lie. His voice had quavered a little when giving his desultory reply, “I’m with you,” but surely that was to be expected when the topic under discussion was engineering life and death on a global scale.
What other answer could he have given? The subtext had been anything but subtle; play along or else a lot more than just his job would be in jeopardy. If Alex was willing to turn an unstoppable pathogenic fungal agent with the potential to destroy all life on earth over to the highest bidder, it was unlikely that he would hesitate to end the life of one reluctant researcher.
Which was why his actual answer probably didn’t matter. Alex would be monitoring him closely now, watching for any hint of disloyalty. A failure to produce results might be misconstrued as uncooperative foot-dragging, or even sabotage.
I can’t let him do this, he thought. Yet, what could he do to oppose Alex’s scheme? There was no one he could confide in. The facility operated with a skeleton crew, and there was no way of knowing if any of those who remained could be trusted.
But he needed to tell somebody.
The answer finally came to him when a notification alert popped on his computer screen, letting him know that it was time to check on the patients.
Maria!
He hastened through the corridors to the BSL IV wing where the infected patients were kept and quickly donned an environment suit. He felt such a sense of urgency that he had to fight the impulse to rush through the safety protocols. After a seeming eternity, the light in the airlock flashed red, indicating that he was now in a “hot” environment.
Instead of methodically visiting each of the infected subjects in turn, as he had done on previous visits, he went straight to Maria’s room. He found her almost exactly as he had left her, facing the wall of her isolation room, as if trying to figure out how to get through it, but now there were red streaks on the walls. Maria had been finger-painting with her own blood.
She turned her head to him as he stepped through the doorway, revealing that the fungal infection had advanced to the next stage. Her face and arms were covered with tiny pinpoint-sized spots of blood — petechial hemorrhaging. As the fever intensified, her blood was thinning, losing its clotting factor, and leaking through her capillaries, and literally oozing from her pores. Even the whites of her eyes were now bright red, and tears of blood were creeping down her cheeks.
She opened her mouth and began speaking, but the words that came out were in the same dialect several of the other patients had been using. It wasn’t just fever-induced gibberish. Alex recognized the strange words. All of the patients had used them, just as they had all drawn the same pictures using their own blood and bodily fluids. Both behaviors were unique symptoms of the infection that Simpson did not yet understand. There had to be some significance to it all, but right now, that was the last thing he was worried about.
Maria frowned as if sensing his inability to understand, and took a deep breath before trying again. “Mind… My mind is losing… Mental.”
Her effort was heartbreaking. “I understand,” he said, trying to spare her from what was clearly an exhausting effort. What he had to say to her would be just as difficult, albeit for very different reasons. “I’m not having any success finding a treatment, and… I’m starting to wonder if I should even keep looking.”
The words poured from him, a repetitive and confused rant that felt more like an apology than an explanation. Maria just stared back at him impassively for a while, but then turned back to the wall to resume painting the strange symbol with her blood, as if he wasn’t even there anymore. He kept talking anyway, hoping that, by putting his jumbled thoughts into words, he might somehow find clarity of purpose.
And in a strange way, he did.
“I wish I had met you sooner, Maria,” he said. “I wish I was more like you. That’s why I got into this. I mean, it was part of the reason, you know? The money, too, but mostly I just wanted to help people. Find some new miracle drug to cure cancer or… ” He sighed and shook his head. “It’s all gone sideways. Even if I do find a treatment, it’s only going to make it worse. Alex will have no reason not to make his weapon… Shadow and Light. Millions will die. Billions maybe. And if I don’t do it, someone else will. Alex will just… ”
He trailed off as the answer came to him. He had looked at the situation every way conceivable, worked out every permutation of the problem, gamed out every possible course of action, and had kept coming back to that same realization. Alex would get his way, whether Simpson helped him or not.